Rather, you wad it up, roll it out again, and make more snowmen. The thing about excess - whether we’re talking about artistic gestures that don’t fit into the standard narrative framework, or the leisure time that we don’t spend in the regimented work/eat/sleep cycle that dominates so much human activity, or the little scraps of cookie dough that are left over after you’ve finished cutting out as many little snowmen (or Christmas trees, or any other non-tessalating holiday iconography) as possible - is that it doesn’t STAY excessive. Only somewhat, to be sure, but I think predictably. I say “at first,” because my experience of these sequences has shifted somewhat over the course of the series. And this is precisely what the set-pieces on Cowboy Bebop accomplish. To provoke that “buzzing confusion,” the object/image/sound must be outside of our conceptual framework. I don’t know what it is, but it looks enough like a kitchen utensil for me to place it in my conceptual framework for kitchen utensils, even if that doesn’t tell me what to do with it. For instance, if I look at this, I don’t feel anything particularly interesting. The sensation is more important than the name.) It’s not enough for the stimulus to be merely unfamiliar. How else could we function? Every once in a while, though, we will see (or hear, or what-have-you) something that provokes this response, and it is at these times that we experience jouissance. This also suggests that this kind of overwhelming perception is not unique to infants - we’re all capable of it, we just tune it all out. Because they have no conceptual framework to which their perceptions can be connected, they do not look at grass and see “grass,” rather, they see something like “GREEN!:prickly?” And although this is only theorized about infants - because how would you test it? - the difficulties encountered by people like Shirl Jennings suggest that it’s not far from the truth. It’s often been suggested that our perception of the world, as adults, is wholly different from the way infants see the world, which William James described as “one great blooming, buzzing confusion.” It’s not a question of the infant’s perceptual apparatus being different, but rather a difference in their system of thought. I used the Lacanian term “jouissance” to describe the sensation evoked by these set-pieces, and it’s worth taking a moment here to explain this concept in slightly greater detail. I’m talking primarily about the action scenes - fights, chases, and the like - but also about the less showy but equally delirious lyrical setpieces, like the bit where Spike and Faye explore Chessmaster Hex’s garden of hobo delights in Bohemian Rhapsody, or Faye’s flashback from this episode. One of the things I found most striking about the show, when first exposed to it, is the way that the set pieces are bracketed off from the main narrative. This isn’t terribly important to the episode itself, but it’s does offer a good opportunity to talk about some interesting things about the series as a whole… or rather, about the experience of watching it. First, let’s talk about Spike’s fight with Appledelhi.
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